The title is taken from the novel of
Peter Handke, who just won the most important literary price for literature
wirtten in German language. But this price has put him currently onto
front pages of international newspapers since the award had been immediately
withheld. He is accused of having been too much a favorite of Serbia andSlovodan
Miloshevich during the war time something that he disputes though he attended
his funeral.

(I myself do not have enough insight
into this particular affair and leave the reading of this video open to
anybody)

The story is about an alienated man,
a former well known goalie who just has lost his job and meanders alienated
through Vienna and a small Austrian border village. His flaneurisim makes
him encounter random people, random love and random violence of all sorts
admidst meditations on the ineviitable but dispossesing proximity and
distance of things and names of things. (not to mention prices of things
and more) Asked by a woman with whom he had a one night stand whether
he is working today, his answer consissts of strangling her to death -
as if by accident, unaware and unmeditated. This is not the only unnatural
death though the book doesn't belong to the genre of murder novels.

This video is part of a series of "kick
readings" I initiated with several books by Sigmund Freud in 2001.
This particular piece has been not only inspired by the current Fussballweltmeisterschaft
(world champioinship) in Germany but also by a certain infamous Austrian/German
tradition of destroying books in the first part of the 20th century.